My slowdown with Adelphia, and the solution
Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 1:08 am
Ladies and gentlemen, I've read lots of posts slamming Adelphia for low bandwidth, poor customer service, and even accusations of bait and switch tatics. Well, my connection also degraded from 3.4meg to about 1.9meg, as determined by Testmy.net, Speakeasy, 2Wire, PCpitstop, and the lists goes on. I trust Testmy.net to be the most accurate and consistent, therefore the speeds that I speak of here all came from there. That being said, I also wish to say that I am in no way affiliated with Adelphia other than being a paying customer for Cable TV and Powerlink services.
With my download speed at 1.9meg the folks with Adelphia customer service said that there was no speed problem with my connection, and refused to investigate beyond a speed test at Testmy.net. Yes, that's correct, their engineer that I spoke to, Susan, had me to go there to determine my connection's speed. She said, "I see no speed problem." I explained how it had gone from 3.4 to 1.9. She said, the cap is 3meg, but not a guaranteed speed. I then told her of Adelphia's own web site's proclamation a while back of the introduction of Premier Link of 4meg, and Power Link's upgrade to 3.4meg. She denied it and said the cap was 3meg, and 1.9meg was not "problem". We all know what a cap means, and we all know it's not a guarantee. Anyway, I'm just making a long story longer. I took matters into my own hand.
Way way back, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I reformatted my pc and had the foresight to make a backup of the clean install of W2K on CDR. That prevented it from being erased at a later date. I restored from this image, and guess what the speeds are, right off the bat. No tweaking or anything. 3,900+! Yep. It seems apparent that somehow the windows registry got changed. I always create full partition images before I make changes to my pc, whether it be by installing a new piece of software, or tinkering with registry settings. Well, it appears that I didn't restore from a backup once after making changes. I don't know. But I do know that it wasn't Adelphia's fault. A friend at work is having problems with her Adelphia connection too. She pisses and moans about how slow it is, how it doesn't even load Adelphia's home page, etc. I'm going to reformat her pc, and I bet that the results are the same for her as they were for me. I'll bet it consistently is faster than 3meg down.
Which leads to another question. 3.9meg+, right after the Power Link installation leads me to believe that the cap here is 4meg, not 3meg. According to Testmy.net if you factor in 12% overhead, my connection's true speed is 4,422 Kbps, or 482KB per second, or 3,948 Kbps minus the 12% (540 KB/sec) overhead.
So perhaps you should do what's necessary to make certain that the problem doesn't lie with your pc first. It's the easiest thing to do, and you don't have to put up with less-than-adequate Adelphia customer service.
Just my experience and opinion. Good luck to youl
Gil
With my download speed at 1.9meg the folks with Adelphia customer service said that there was no speed problem with my connection, and refused to investigate beyond a speed test at Testmy.net. Yes, that's correct, their engineer that I spoke to, Susan, had me to go there to determine my connection's speed. She said, "I see no speed problem." I explained how it had gone from 3.4 to 1.9. She said, the cap is 3meg, but not a guaranteed speed. I then told her of Adelphia's own web site's proclamation a while back of the introduction of Premier Link of 4meg, and Power Link's upgrade to 3.4meg. She denied it and said the cap was 3meg, and 1.9meg was not "problem". We all know what a cap means, and we all know it's not a guarantee. Anyway, I'm just making a long story longer. I took matters into my own hand.
Way way back, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I reformatted my pc and had the foresight to make a backup of the clean install of W2K on CDR. That prevented it from being erased at a later date. I restored from this image, and guess what the speeds are, right off the bat. No tweaking or anything. 3,900+! Yep. It seems apparent that somehow the windows registry got changed. I always create full partition images before I make changes to my pc, whether it be by installing a new piece of software, or tinkering with registry settings. Well, it appears that I didn't restore from a backup once after making changes. I don't know. But I do know that it wasn't Adelphia's fault. A friend at work is having problems with her Adelphia connection too. She pisses and moans about how slow it is, how it doesn't even load Adelphia's home page, etc. I'm going to reformat her pc, and I bet that the results are the same for her as they were for me. I'll bet it consistently is faster than 3meg down.
Which leads to another question. 3.9meg+, right after the Power Link installation leads me to believe that the cap here is 4meg, not 3meg. According to Testmy.net if you factor in 12% overhead, my connection's true speed is 4,422 Kbps, or 482KB per second, or 3,948 Kbps minus the 12% (540 KB/sec) overhead.
So perhaps you should do what's necessary to make certain that the problem doesn't lie with your pc first. It's the easiest thing to do, and you don't have to put up with less-than-adequate Adelphia customer service.
Just my experience and opinion. Good luck to youl
Gil